Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Even the Heritage Foundation Criticises White House on Katrina Handling

I never thought the day would come when the right-wing Heritage Foundation criticises a Republican White House, But here it is. From American Progress:

The Bush administration has been ineptly slow to respond to the housing crisis left in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Bruce Katz, a policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, said, "We could have thousands, if not tens of thousands of families, in stable permanent housing right now." Instead, the administration has "moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11 million a night, a strategy local officials and some members of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful." FEMA missed its self-imposed deadline to have the quarter-million-plus evacuees in shelters relocated by last weekend; the first of many trailer park towns opened recently. But even the trailer towns are not considered the best way to spend federal resources and help evacuees get back on their feet. Ronald D. Utt, a former senior official at HUD and Reagan administration aide who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was left at a loss trying to explain the administration's housing policy: "This is not incompetence. This is willful. That is the only way I can explain it."

4 Comments:

Hertiage Foundation? They (illegally) had a hand in writing the Gingrich budget and have been Republican cheerleaders from the get-go. Any disagreement they have with any Republican is usually because they are not right-wing enough.